1. Field of endeavor
The present invention relates generally to social networking, and more particularly to systems, processes or methods of voting and expression of preference in social collaborations. Social structures are the means by which humans combine efforts, expertise and knowledge to provide quality solutions to shared problems or to exploit opportunities. The basis for societal collaboration is the principal of one-person one-vote in which each member of society holds a natural right to a single vote, herein referred to as a single whole natural vote.
The information processing capabilities of a society are the bounding conditions within which all tradeoffs between the capacity and quality of decision making take place. Practical limitation of time and space upon information processing has historically hindered the effectiveness of collaborative decision-making and necessitated compromises to accommodate greater numbers of individuals and to increase the decision making capacity of collaborative processes. These compromises manifest themselves as reduced quality of decisions. The use of dynamically propagated trust metrics in the context of social networks can advance the quality of society's collaborative decision-making abilities, allowing the preference of individuals to be influential, not just upon those people they interact in one degree of separation, but through and beyond n degrees of separation.
2. State of the Art
Current voting methods within social networks are insufficient to realize the full potential for social network based collaborative decision making. Present state of the art voting in social networks can be classified as either opportunistic or solicited. Polling or surveying as a solicitation of user preference is done in ordered to characterize individual or market preference. Solicitation of preference is also used by administrators of social networks to invoke a greater sense of belonging, and to attract and retain users. Opportunistic expression of preference by voting within a social network is most often in the context of a specific event in which individuals are offered one or a few categorical choices. In practice, state of the art opportunistic voting had been in the form of a “Like” feature in which an individual user is given the opportunity to endorse another user, or to create a social recommendation.
Recommendations and endorsements are qualitative expressions of trust, whereas trust metrics are quantitative representations. Qualitative expressions of trust are a limitation to the scaling of collaborative processes to accommodate larger populations. Current limited use of quantitative trust metrics in social networks have been for verifying identification of users or agents, authorization of access to protected resources, or for controlling communications. In similar dearth, state of the art use of proxy within virtual communal spaces such as social networks has been limited to gaming proxy such as “Avatars”, or other social agents. Limited systemic or automated use of proxy has been used for the prioritization of system resources as an element of adaptive system resource deployment.
The state of the art application of voting, and the use of trust metrics and proxy in social networks have been limited by use of antiquated constructs that do not take advantage of social network's ability to scale in extent and complexity. Trust metrics have been of limited use, and aside from a “Like” feature or a selection between a few “Endorse” buttons, have afforded no direct advancement to activities of individual users. Uses of proxy in social networks have been the granting of the whole of single privilege to another user or simulated user agent, rather than a division of proxy.